Forward

All
creative license and legal rights to characters, settings, and story
are reserved and retained by their original owners. I do not claim
creative rights to anything beyond the personal stories of those
characters that I created within.

This story is set in the fictional world of EVE Online and uses characters created and played by multiple people. I’ve chosen to write the story assuming a basic awareness of the history of New Eden and the tales of its people as set forth by CCP. Those unfamiliar with the world should read the brief forward which covers just enough of that background to move onto the prelude.

Somewhere
lost in the vast history of New Eden is the tale of how humanity took
an ultimate leap through the EvE gate, a portal that would propel them
to another galaxy and begin one of the greatest stories of our time.
Over millennia, civilization in New Eden has taken many forms,
eventually coalescing into the rise of the four primary empires; Amarr,
Gallente, Caldari, and Minmatar. At the dawning of the Empyrean age
cloning technology matured and along with advancements in
neuro-technical science, gave rise to a whole new type of human; the
capsuleer. With the right genetic compatibility, a person could be
cloned into a body which could interface directly with a starship and
become virtually immortal. When a capsuleer was killed, their
consciousness would be violently ripped from the present clone and
instantly sent to another clone.

Each
empire, and every faction in between, began the greatest arms race the
galaxy had seen; capsuleers were courted as near-gods and anyone with
the right genetic makeup was tested and recruited with fervor. In time
the capsuleers themselves found that their power exceeded even the great
empires themselves, banding together to form their own vast empires on
the edge of known space. CONCORD, empowered to preserve the peace from a
time before even the first capsuleers, found that they had little
jurisdiction within those outer reaches and so accepted the task of
preventing at least known criminals from returning to the higher
security central systems where the original four empires still held
sovereignty. Unable to prevent them, great wars raged between the
null-security alliances and empires and continue even to this day.

Back
within the relatively safe territories which came to be referred to as
high-security space, or simply 'high-sec' there were those who began to
question some of the imposing limitations set forth by CONCORD and
upheld by even the most destructive of the outer alliances. Seeking
freedom from a system that deemed automated intelligence as
fundamentally non-sentient and restricted further advancements in clone
sciences, Saede Riordan and several hundred like-minded individuals left
known space and ventured through a wormhole into the Anoikis cluster, a
labyrinth of ever changing wormhole connected systems unchartable to
known science and unreachable to all but the most dedicated explorers.
They took with them embryonic rogue drone AIs with which they hoped to
raise free and sentient AI.

In
the many months that it took CONCORD to finally locate Saede and her
followers, they had successfully established a colony, introduced fully
digital minds into their society, and hacked through just about every
security firewall with which CONCORD maintained ultimate control over
the capsuleer population. CONCORD's attempts to regain control over
those capsuleers who fled with Saede into the system they now called
Origin were immediately met with the promise that the new fledgling
Colonial Government would release their hacks to the greater high-sec
capsuleer population should CONCORD ever try to invade their new home.
Faced with a stalemate, CONCORD was forced to cede any control they had
hoped to establish over Origin and instead focus on policing those who
came and went from it.

Within
the relative safety of their new frontier home, the colonists of
Origin, protected by their very own capsuleer corporation; Alexylva
Paradox, established their capital, Foundation City. They further
established a government of Coordinators who, along with their
sophisticate and sentient AI began almost immediate advances into
neuro-technics and cloning sciences. Within only a year, their top
scientists had discovered the key to allow each and every citizen over
the biological age of 14 the ability to save off a digital copy of their
consciousness to be revived and cloned should they ever die. The new
clone couldn't retain the memories from the time passed since the person
was scanned, and so regular 'back-ups' became a way of life for the
quickly expanding population.

Such
miracles of science also created an almost constant need for raw
biomass with which to generate new clones. A practice of donating one's
body back to be biomassed for the community upon death became mandatory
and even the capsuleers would spend the extra diligence to retrieve any
corpses from the occasional invader into Origin. Morbidity turned to
routine and routine to purpose as overtime the cycle of biomass became
as accepted as the cycle of precipitation. It was believed that this
practice or at least word of it lead to some of the belief held
among those in high-sec that all people who lived in wormholes were
cannibals and monsters of myth.